Followup: I believe the problem with the intro to actually be a problem with the sound driver itself.....software updates seem to have killed my driver, and re-installing an updated driver resulted in the intro music playing.....and then the game crashed. New error log below:

Eventually tracked the issue down to the system getting munted by an update. Ran a cold boot (which for this laptop is an annoyingly long process), ccleaned the file system and registry to clean things up, and at that point things fixed themselves. Resolved.

Edit: Actually, worked once, then stopped working again. I've got no idea why this time. Definitely not resolved.

So after that cold boot, the game ran once.....and then when I tried it again, it failed. 100% of the time. So I cut code and extensions stuff until it worked:

Exactly what was causing the problem, I am uncertain. I had set SM&M++ to over-ride the korolov station in Charon, to run weapons tests. And when I did that, it worked fine. Now though, having that station code there causes a failure on startup. Since I was planning to do it anyway, I've removed the problem code and the game now runs. There may be an actual bug lurking in there somewhere though: this behaviour is unusual.